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A colt who has just moved to Ponyville is bullied by his classmates. His cheeks flush when his new teacher Miss Cheerilee wears a daisy behind her ear.
Written for A Thousand Words Contest III. Submitted to the Drama, Slice of Life, and Experimental categories, the last because of the detached narrative style and because I know one judge who will hate it, but I want to expand their horizons.
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That was nice!
Boat!
derpicdn.net/img/view/2018/7/22/1786787.png
Source.
(Edit: turns out that boat played a much larger role in this story than I expected.)
Good.
Justice will be served!
Time to fix that.
Good story!
I enjoyed reading it.
Even if I have to admit I didn't fully understand the ending.
This one left me with a lot of questions. But hey, isn't that the point of this kind of story? I found this really sweet! I wish I had a teacher like Ms. Cheerilee growing up...
Is the narrative style meant to evoke Benjy Compson from The Sound and the Fury?
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No. While The Sound and the Fury is one of my favorites, Benjy's section has sudden shifts in time and place as events in the present remind him of the past, and I feel like that makes it quite personal. This story, by contrast, is completely linear, told by a third-person narrator who follows the colt closely but never looks inside the his mind.
The style of this story was actually inspired by the very beginning of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which describes Stephen Dedalus's early childhood and has some stylistic resemblance:
Joyce uses this style because Stephen is so young that he has only limited comprehension of the world. (The reference to bedwetting puts him around three or four years old.) I was inspired by this to try not letting any character interpret the story's action at all. The overall effect is quite different, because when young Stephen does have an opinion, Joyce shares it:
whereas I don't:
The scenes of the bullies pushing the colt into the mud are also derived from Joyce:
In my mind, the event of being pushed into something cold and dirty merged with the idea of not seeing into any character's thoughts, and the result was this story.
Ah, should've seen the parallels with Portrait, which I also love. Even though there’s no playing with temporality or first-person perspective, there are several reasons that I interpreted the protagonist as being like Benjy:
1. He seems to be at an earlier stage of cognitive development than Cheerilee’s foals generally are. Though he’s verbal, unlike Benjy, the thoughts he expresses are extremely simple. You do specify that he’s younger than at least some of the other foals, but his thoughts and actions are more along the lines of a five-year-old’s.
2. The colt evokes the same sort of plant imagery with Cheerilee that Benjy does with Caddy (he takes comfort in her smelling like trees, which he implicitly ties to her nurturing nature).
3. I thought there must have been a “reason” for the colts to bully him other than that he’s the new kid. It would make a certain amount of perverse sense for him to be bullied for being developmentally disabled. Ponyville would not have the resources for separate special ed classrooms, and it seemed like his parents were ignorant of his needs and desires, whereas he responded positively to Cheerilee’s affirmations of his personhood.
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Yes, I did intend him to be young, around five or six (in human years). At such ages, children have thoughts, but not complex thoughts, not even if they're smart children. Alas, we are not told his thoughts; we are told what he sees ("he noticed for the first time the white petals," "he saw her smile and the daisy again") and what his body feels ("The mud was cold and slippery," "the warm bath"), we can infer some of his thoughts ("he strutted as they walked side-by-side," "he made an angry wordless growl and clutched the boat"), and occasionally, the narrative could be interpreted as a glimpse into his thinking ("he made sure she could if she wanted," "the empty place behind her ear"). But I tried to make sure we almost never see his thoughts directly. (I made an exception for "behind her ear didn’t look empty to him anymore," which is definitely telling us one of his thoughts.)
(Alas, I just caught a mistake! In the second bullying scene, I said he "wished she wore a daisy," which is precisely the kind of peek into his thoughts I wanted to avoid. I've modified it.)
Not having any access at all to any character's thoughts is unusual and makes it difficult to interpret the story. It would certainly explain some things if the colt is developmentally disabled. But it's also possible that he's physically disabled (for example, maybe he has an artificial limb) or is small for his age or has a prominent birthmark or has an unusual accent or is socially awkward or even is completely normal. Bullies don't need a good reason to bully someone, and we're never given an explanation. We don't find out what his parents think, either. Did his mother scold him because he's played in the mud before? Did he say nothing about being pushed because he was intimidated by the older colts, by his mother, by both, or for some other reason? We don't learn how much time there is between the first and last scenes, either. The whole story might happen over a few days or a few months. You can try to infer something about timing from the weather, but the only clues are that the mud was "cold and slippery" the first time and "thick and almost frozen" the last time (but was that a change of weather or a change of seasons?) and that, in the final scene, he eats lunch under "the warm sun" (but when is the sun not warm?).
My most direct inspiration for the daisy was the bridal veil that Cheerilee wears in S2E17 ("Hearts and Hooves Day"), which has a flower design on either side of the headband. You're right that it evokes Caddy smelling like trees. But Benjy wasn't in my mind when I was writing; if he had been, the bullying scenes might have been filled with "he hit and the other hit" instead.